I just received a new USB Picoscope for various hobby projects. I was happy to see that one of the serial decoders is for DCC. After setting up the scope to my command station I have been able to get preamble information using the software. Has anyone had any success extracting the data bytes within the packets? What settings work best for this?

Thank you for the quick reply. I tried all other time bases. The only two that were able to capture preamble data are 1 ms / div or 2 ms / div. The pre amble is only captured say 50% of the time. The model of my scope is 2204A.

Could it be a threshold problem? In the setup dialog, what do threshold 1 and threshold 2 correspond to? I have been using auto setup to determine these values.

Also here is another screenshot that show a valid complete DCC packet being capture but still the error reads Not enough data?

The 2204a is a low memory device, so we will need to use streaming mode to capture the data to the PC. To do this just use the following settings :-

Across the top100ms/div x100 1MS

At the bottomSingle 50%

and then make sure that

Tools->Preferences->Sampling->CollectionTime is set to 100ms/div

The trace will now draw across the screen, which is zoomed at the trigger point so you can see the actual data, and hopefully you will have decoded data. You can move the trigger position, and zoomed area, around to make sure you see the full data packet.

If you still have difficulty please post a data file so that we can check the settings, File->Save